Who Is Rich?

by Matthew Klam

  She yawned, then started snoring loudly like she was about to suffocate herself. I figured it was the drugs, and couldn’t even pretend to sleep until her breathing changed, and crawled out from under her and into the other twin bed, and lay there.

  I wanted to get paid. She had enough money for a thousand jerkoffs. A basic level of support, half a million a year, was nothing, a weekend island rental. Azamanian’s billions were like a weather phenomenon that forced the natural world into contortions, turned dune scrub into rarefied architecture and putting greens. His crazy blown-out beach house made money sexy or scary but not real. But the proximity to her dough had worn me down, whatever protection I’d had from it. She loved me, but how much? By now Robin would’ve received an email alert of our zero balance. Or maybe they didn’t send them out on weekends. We could’ve transferred funds from our savings account, but we didn’t have a savings account. I’d broken our trust, which I’d only be destroying again through my artwork, by using my indiscretion as a source of inspiration. I couldn’t stand it. I had goals and dreams. How long would I have to wait to make them real? For now, though, I needed money from my brother, or half from him and half from Robin’s dad, right away, this week, for Kaya’s preschool. There were other bills I couldn’t let myself think about, but that one had to be paid. I told myself it would be okay. Amy wouldn’t let me starve. She’d never let me suffer. Then I remembered that she’d offered some kind of support, up in her closet in Connecticut, while I lay on the floor with my pants down, and I’d told her to shove it.

  Sunday morning we waited in line for coffee, sniffing milk containers, listening as Dennis Fleigel gave Mohammad Khan a cost-benefit analysis of last night’s fundraiser. Weather had moved in off the ocean and sat over us like wet gray wool. Roberta stumbled through the fog in dark sunglasses and ducked under a tent flap. Alicia Hernandez Roulet reached past me for milk, trailed by her little goblin, and I bent over to scratch his belly. The blood rushed to my head, and I almost fell down. I felt sick, but also solid, dense, and concentrated, jacked with endorphins from screwing and falling in love. I stroked his fur, girded by this small task, sensing a past-life kinship, and dropped to my knees and spoke to him.

  On the planet where we came from, you were free to love and be loved. On that planet, the system didn’t beat you into submission. You could lie on your back with your weenie out, and no one stopped you. I read his name tag. Rabies on one side, Piccolo on the other. I felt happy, and a little insane, but I could do whatever I wanted, and whispered in his ear that his real name was Bubbles, and sang him the inchworm song, which was one of Beanie’s favorites. The two of them were about the same size and length. I picked him up and cradled him and called him my child, my son. There were black spots on his wet pink tongue. He had his lipstick out. So much love to give.

  I understood him, because I’d considered hanging myself just last night—and in that liminal space had received a kind of grace. I didn’t want to hurt myself anymore. My self-destructive urges had been replaced by a rush of pity for the seven billion assholes of earth, even Robin, maybe her most of all, out there on the straight and narrow, going it alone. I thought again of my hand in Amy’s hair, her mouth before we kissed. Sex, afterglow, possession, elation. I’d write a happy story of transformation, growth, and forgiveness, drawn without inflection or ambivalence. It would be easy to do. The work would go quickly. My pages would look schematic. I’d crank out an entire book in six months, zip zip. My hero would thrive.

  Early this morning the Barn had rattled in the wind, blowing curtains. A mist fell through the skylight, dripping onto our blankets. I climbed back into her twin bed, and we listened to the soothing tap upon the roof, and talked the way we had over email, rambling away in gravelly voices about our first summer jobs, the pickup truck I drove delivering auto parts, the neighbor she babysat for, their kitchen AM radio and the songs it played that summer, catechism class, brushing her grandmother’s honey-blond wig. I loved lying there. We’d slept naked, and our legs were cool and smooth. Her arm had started to throb but not too badly. I reminded her of a family trip she’d once told me about, it took place thirty years ago, the parents and kids in one tent in some state park on the ocean, how it rained all weekend and her father sang in his Irish tenor and they slept in a puddle and were happy.

  She said, “Everyone spends their whole life looking for their daddy,” and I said that might be true, and she pulled me tight against her and said, “I don’t want to go home.”

  I saw the clock on the stove, and knew I had to get to class. I wondered if she’d figured out her plans. But she rolled onto her back, breathing funny, and said that she wasn’t taking any helicopter in this weather. Then she told me Lily had called from sleepaway camp, and it was not the first time, either, in which she’d pleaded to come home. She’d said she was ashamed of the scars on her head, and her cabinmates were mean, although they’d voted her president of the Squirrel Den. Mike had insisted that Lily go away for camp, even though she was seven and had had emergency brain surgery in March, and had missed a month of school because she could barely walk. She hadn’t wanted to go, and had never spent a night away from home in her life without her mother. Mike knew almost nothing about his kid’s procedure, hadn’t been listening during the few doctor’s appointments he’d attended, but felt in his expertise that two weeks among strangers would be good for her, hiking, picking up survival skills, learning to water-ski, and, at the end of two weeks, running a 5K race. This seemed like a winning proposition to confirm her recovery and help her regain her self-confidence. It was sick, twisted, and evil. Amy felt powerless to protect her.

  She also worried about the neurological stress tests Lily would be doing as soon as camp ended, to see if they needed to open up her skull again. Then she realized that with the next couple days free, she could drive up to New Hampshire, maybe later today, to surprise Lily, to bust her out and bring her home.

  I was afraid to mention my own kids’ near-death experiences, afraid she’d unnerve me by attacking Robin or demand some gruesome detail. But when I did, she didn’t pry any further. My son had almost choked. My daughter was all cut up.

  “You need to concentrate on them,” she said sadly. “You should go home.”

  “No.” Anyway, I couldn’t. I had to teach my class and get paid. I mentioned the pit behind Curtis’s, and that idiot Brett, merging that other life with this one, a necessary and welcome violation, a doubling of my selves. I felt bigger, more enmeshed. I told her how grateful I was that it hadn’t been worse, that I didn’t have to drive nine hours to a hospital so that I could sit by the bed of my kid, and left it at that.

  “But doesn’t it seem a little weird?” she said. “First Lily, then my wrist, and now your kids?”

  “You think God is watching, making adjustments to our lives so we can experience the right amount of pain?”

  “Don’t talk to me like that.”

  I said, “If Lily hadn’t played soccer that day, she wouldn’t have ended up in the doctor’s office.” The puking and the fainting had led to tests and finally an MRI, which picked up a rare malformation, a weakness in the branch point of an artery under the brain. The room had quickly filled up with doctors who’d never seen it except in an autopsy. “What do you call that if it’s not good luck?”

  Amy didn’t care what I said. She’d had plenty of good luck in her life, and look where it got her. Then, for no reason, we started frantically kissing and hugging. We did it again, sideways this time, spooning, another first in a series of firsts, just as good as the other ways, better maybe, but with more blood. It seemed the parts of us were smarter than the whole. Or dumber, much dumber. I felt sorry for those parts, worn and red and working away down there when all we wanted was to cry. I was sad, patient, and careful with her, but very connected, impossibly close, and as I got closer I could hear her breathing with me. This was undeniably an activity in which we both excelled. We came at the same moment, kablam
mo, which of course I’d read about in dirty magazines as a youth, and had imagined but never in my life experienced until that instant. I hadn’t even been sure such a thing was possible, though apparently it was, and showed the rare wonder of our compatibility, right down to the nerve endings, a sign of this instinctual trust. It was so good we started laughing, like scientists celebrating a discovery after an explosion blew up the lab, banging our heads on the ceiling, giggling when we did. I was late for breakfast, and jumped up and threw my clothes on and kissed her goodbye, “So long, kid,” like it was nothing, and had to run out the door with my shirt unbuttoned and my flip-flops flapping.

  I stood in the rain, soaked in that remembering, blowing on my coffee, trying to restart the loop, rewinding and freezing images until the boy who worked in the main office banged a stick against a tent pipe to get everyone’s attention.

  People knew him now and screamed his name in joyful mockery. Christopher! He wore a festive yellow slicker and black rubber boots. He announced changes in the day’s shuttle bus schedule, warning us that the clouds would soon be gone and the sun would return. Amy could hop into her car or chopper away in clear skies. More hooting. We were as a group undaunted by weather, awake and alert, as if this were the real world, the one we were born for, and not that other one of petty, groping, pasty drones who cowered all winter in the dark and cold. Boys and girls from the lacrosse camp ran across the far fields, helmets slung on their sticks. A seagull hovered over the garbage can as I moved to the toaster. I was exhausted, and the pain of my exhaustion forced me to move stiffly; I felt it in the sore muscles in my jaw and head.

  “I love Mark,” said the girl on the other side of the buffet table.

  “Who is, of course, a very good friend of Teddy’s,” the guy said.

  “Teddy was terrific in that play.” They were referring, of course, to Puss in Boots the musical, put on by the University of Michigan. The girl had bright pink hair and sparkly blue fingernails. The guy wore a clean white T-shirt and a Palestinian scarf. There were lines on either side of the table and conversations going on all around me. Earlier this morning, someone explained, a German television crew had arrived to do a piece on Tom McLaughlin, as part of a series on American writers.

  “Dearest friend of my life,” said a man with salt-and-pepper hair. A woman handed him a coffee. Something dreaded and illicit passed between them. Down the line a conversation turned to last night’s dinner, which had been vegetarian, raw and inedible. People openly complained. Last year’s breakfast of bagels and cream cheese had been replaced by cooked grains and bricks of rock-hard Irish soda bread, which we sawed at as if it were a tree limb with a knife that wasn’t up to the task. And there’d been a fight about the air-conditioning in the dorm between a woman in a Pucci dress and her roommate, who insisted on sleeping in flannel, while a party had raged outside someone else’s door at two A.M. A woman in a pretty turquoise blouse told a skinny guy with tattoos, “It’s a new poem, dedicated to my future ex-husband’s fiancée. I call it ‘Stay the Fuck Away from My Kids, You Whore.’ ” There was some kind of heated, inordinate bonding that happened among grown-ups, forced out of their decorous privacy into visceral closeness, that had the feeling of an open-air loony bin.

  I carried my toast and coffee and a single hard-boiled egg, rolling loosely in a white plastic bowl, past Professor Michnick, seated with Alicia H. R. and my newfound, foot-tall, walleyed tongue-wagging interplanetary soul mate; past Carl, who gave me a listless wave, in the wrinkled yellow linen shirt he’d worn to last night’s fundraiser and appeared to have slept in; past a table of black actors, black poets and writers. They tended to congregate at meals, triggering my jealousy, curiosity, and involuntary anxiety. Herschel Davies, the playwright, was a buddy of mine. He taught at SMU. His play about coming of age in Cleveland in the sixties was very good; it had been performed here and later ran on Broadway. He’d nicknamed me “the hamster,” in recognition of my scrappy defense in our Ping-Pong matches. Their table was full.

  I finally arrived without incident at a nearly empty table. Seated alone there was Angel Solito, which I didn’t notice until I’d already put down my plate. He glanced up, frowning, and didn’t appear to recognize me, but then did, but didn’t look any happier, reaching for his books and papers and pulling them to him as I sat, trying to think of something to say.

  “Doing okay?”

  “Yup.” It was like some idiotic cartoonist conspiracy.

  “Ready for class?”

  “We’re learning how to tell a story.” His head drooped, from annoyance or exhaustion, or some attempt to commiserate. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say about teaching, even though I’d planned my lecture and class was starting in five minutes. “Can’t teach the story,” he said. “That’s in you. That has to come out.” He had pages of notes and lesson plans, textbooks and anthologies. We agreed on the impossibility of teaching, can’t teach talent, all the old clichés. I needed to eat. I took a sip of scalding coffee and started to choke. Winston Doyoyo, the old lion, arose from the table of black people, circled us, and landed at Solito’s shoulder, placed a hand on his neck and said something as Solito nodded politely. Doyoyo ducked stiffly out of the tent. Solito went back to his notes.

  “Theory won’t do a fucking thing for you,” he said.

  “Nope.”

  “Still, Aristotle knew what a story was.” He mentioned Shakespeare. I needed ketchup. Freytag had mapped it out, but apparently that was just an exhaustive examination of the mechanics of Greek drama. Then he mentioned the Aristotelian three-act structure of Star Wars, then Gilgamesh. “Although technically that’s Eastern.”

  “Wait, what’s Eastern?” I couldn’t function in this dialectic.

  “Gilgamesh.”

  “Anyway,” I said, “I didn’t get a chance to tell you yesterday how much I like your stuff.” His eyes were steady. I figured my praise was suspect. “I meant to tell you.” His teeth went in different directions. He needed orthodontia. I asked where he’d been before this.

  “Seattle and Vancouver.”

  “You’re staying in the dorms here on campus?”

  He nodded. I asked where. Stewart, the moldy, stinko dorm by the water. Small hands, narrow yellow wrists, darker skin at the knuckles, narrow face, shining hair, fine features. I felt everything about him, all at once. We discussed the smelly carpets, ugly bunk beds made of logs painted brown. At age four, he was pulled off a bus and dumped in a government facility in Chiapas. Smugglers ditched toddlers at the first sign of trouble. He didn’t know his full name. At age eight, his little legs were still too short to allow him to hop the train. Other kids fell off and were cut in half. He’d been born into a brutal world, and had made a journey like the ocean crossing my orphaned grandfather had made, all alone, back in 1911—if my grandfather had been forced to swim the Atlantic. I wished him luck on the book tour in Europe. He stared at me, twisting his brow.

  “I know your work,” he said, looking away, then straightening his notes, “Suspicious Package Number 4 came out while I was in grad school.” He looked up. “And Number 5. Almost everyone in my program made comics on the side. Not everyone was as dedicated as I was, but we were all tuned in.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Of the indie cartoonists who’d broken through, the more successful ones making long, serious comics, no one was more talked about than you.”

  I thanked him. For a second I thought he’d said something nice. Then I realized he hadn’t. Something flashed across his face that I chose to ignore. He didn’t say anything else. Had he actually insulted me? Or had he only meant to say that my work provoked strong reactions? I felt a sudden pride of my own, a compact thing with jagged stuff inside it. The jagged stuff started hacking its way out. I picked off some eggshell, putting it in the bowl, ignoring his insult, letting him have his little dig.

  “Well,” I said. “I hope you enjoy your success. I hope it never ends.” He nodded, waiting for
more. “I hope it brings attention to the issue of immigration,” I said. “Children crossing borders, whatever. It’s important.” I needed salt.

  “It’s the story of my life,” he said. “And that’s what people are expecting from me. But is that what I expect from myself?”

  “Is it?” Who gives a crap.

  “I’m sick of it.”

  I banged my toast on the table and stuck it in the coffee.

  “I have to tell you,” he said. “When that story came out in the Times.”

  “Please, tell me.” I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  It seemed that when the profile on Solito was published, it wrecked his outlier status. He became a name. He spoke from deep inside some bubble of invulnerable obsession, locked in, unashamed. “Don’t get me wrong—I’m lucky, I know it. I live in airports. I eat out of vending machines. I smile in public and sign books. And they come up after and hug me and take pictures, and I wonder, How am I supposed to survive this? Like, how do you go back to work when people are hanging on your every word and pleading with you for whatever it is they want? Or they haven’t even read the book, just read about it and show up at signings and expect some kind of TED talk, something inspiring. Or they don’t care what it’s about, they want to debunk it, catch me in a lie, did it really happen this way, is it true, oh my God. Or, Hey, can you come to my fundraiser, for nothing, tomorrow at six? I get grumpy after five minutes, and every night there’s this huge line and I have to sit there and listen. ‘Great question, let me see if I can answer that.’ It was packed in Seattle. I have one more in New York before I fly to Amsterdam. It’s getting worse.”

  A guy went by and said something to him in Spanish. Solito turned, waiting patiently until the man was done. His shoulders slumped as he leaned toward me and said, more quietly, “But it’s all so singular, my heartbreaking childhood, my continental trek. Like I had a choice. It’s not anything I can duplicate.”